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Sunday, August 9, 2009

First Surfing Lesson!!

Geoff and I had a fabulous week! On Tuesday, the new international hires played a hilarious game of Charades at Eric's and Colleen's apartment over drinks and popcorn. Then, on Thursday night, some of the same people went salsa-dancing with us at an awesome salsa spot in the neighborhood. The cover charge was $5, but there was a live band and some serious salsa-dancers there! I had a ton of fun asking the locals to dance, and Geoff and I are definitely planning on returning to that place regularly once we start taking salsa lessons. :) Finally, over the weekend, Geoff and I caught a movie (G.I. Joe, which was surprisingly decent), went to scope out the famous volcanoes and the beautiful Lago Coatepeque, and even took our first surfing lesson down at El Tunco!!!

...Surfing was really fun, but also a lot harder than I had imagined. Admittedly, I'm not the strongest swimmer, and my upper-body strength is definitely non-existent. Paddling my way on the long surfboard all the way out to where the waves break was so discouraging, that I actually almost asked my surfing coach to let me go back to the shore. Literally, he had to drag my board all the way out there each time, in addition to paddling for himself. --So embarrassing! It was only later that Ali and Jose told us that it is pretty common that the surfing instructors have to drag the newbies out there, because you just don't build the same upper-body strength doing anything else than surfing. Anyway, the actual surfing part was a BLAST. It's not easy to stand up on the board, obviously, but the long boards we had actually felt really stable; even I caught a wave that pushed me all the way out to the beach! It was awesome! And a definite do-over at some point (after we do some pushups, perhaps).

There were some other things I had wanted to say, but I'm so exhausted from the week that I'm going to just crash now. Tomorrow's the first official day back at work for all teachers, so I'm going to start being very busy! Our school day here starts early -- I will have to leave home at 6:30am everyday from now on, to arrive at school with a little bit of time to spare. Yikes...